


Fallout

by ivyfic



Category: Constantine (2005)
Genre: Gen, Meta, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-03-12
Updated: 2005-03-12
Packaged: 2017-10-16 21:06:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/169351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivyfic/pseuds/ivyfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Constantine explains it all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fallout

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a bit of first person Constantine POV, an exercise in world-building, my attempt to work out the rules of the movie-verse.

Here’s how it was. Before ‘Let There Be Light,’ before The Word, there was a war. We don’t know what it was like before the war, but war is a universal, something we’re very familiar with. And at some point both sides realized that neither had the arms to win, all They could do was pick at each other bit by bit until there was nothing left. And as much as They both wanted to win, losing was just not an option. So They called a truce, held a conference and hammered out a peace treaty. And both of Them could deal with that because both of Them believed They would win in the long run.

So They each went back to their kingdoms and built walls around themselves and built armies behind those walls, and between those two kingdoms They put a DMZ. The mortal plane.

And that’s how it’s been since time started ticking, both of Them rearming and plotting for when the war breaks out again, as They both know it will, and in the meantime They watch the DMZ, and send their soldiers to make sure the other guy’s soldiers aren’t out of line.

Maybe the Garden of Eden was His first strategy to infiltrate the DMZ and maybe the Tree of Knowledge was necessitated by the accords that maintained the peace. And maybe the snake was Lucifer’s first blow back. And that’s how it always goes, blows struck back and forth between the sides and we’re always stuck in the middle.

In a war, it’s the civilians that lose. Always. Always, always. And in this war, that’s us. All of us. All of humanity. Stuck between two armies, living in the desolation, surrounded by mines and barbed wire while the two generals glare at each other over Their stockades.

We didn’t start this war. We were born into it. And it’s been going on so long we can’t even imagine there’s any other way for things to be.

After the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was a story of a young boy and his brother. They ran from the city, survived the blast, but they had no parents anymore, no one left to take care of them. All the adults were too busy fighting their war to notice two lost children. So they tried to take care of themselves. They wandered on their own until they starved to death.

We are the children in this war. We wander forgotten by those who should care for us until we die. And that’s a best case scenario. Because someday the bombs will start falling again and things will get much worse.

That’s what The Last Judgment is, really. The day when one side steps over the line and the other steps over the line and suddenly there’s no DMZ anymore, and at the end of the day it’s just the two of Them, together, counting tallies like refs at a soccer match. How many souls one direction, how many souls the other.

Because it’s not about justice, not for us. It’s not about getting what you deserve when you die, it’s not about whether you were a good person. It’s about whether you followed the rules They set out at the beginning. It’s about how many Hail Mary’s versus how many God damn’s. There’s about as much justice in that as in an abacus.

The kicker – the real genius of it – is that we will never know what the rules we will be judged by are until it’s too late, and I don’t think we’ll even know then. Sure, He left around some guidelines, but they’re so vague and contradictory and muddled by human politics that they’re completely useless. And if you try to find out the rules, that’s hubris. It’s _gnosis_ , divine knowledge, and that has to be given, not taken, or you, like the Tower of Babel, are doomed to Fall.

It would be like the IRS coming and taking your house when they never told you what you had to pay. He cares as much about human rights as Idi Amin.

Since I was fifteen I haven’t really thought about the future. That’s not true – I think about it every second of every day; it’s like the Sword of Damocles hanging over me, it’s always there no matter how much I try to ignore it. I knew what the end of my story would be; He’d already passed judgment on me. So it didn’t matter so much what happened to me in the meantime.

I suppose some would view that knowledge as blank check. You’re going to Hell anyway, that means nothing you could possibly do would make it any worse. Double jeopardy. You could sin as much as you wanted, it was too late anyway. But me, I’ve always been a weasel. I weasel my way out of everything and this didn’t seem any different. I got a second chance and I was going to spend every damn second of it finding a way around the rules.

That’s why I smoked – it calmed me enough to focus more on the work and I honestly never thought about the consequences. Cancer, emphysema, all that was for everyone else, the ants who didn’t know what was really going on, not for me.

So _gnosis_ , yeah, I didn’t have to wait around for divine revelation, and it seemed to be the only way out of this. I studied and I fought and I took every risk I could because if I pulled this con off it would all be worth it.

You know what they say about the five stages of dying – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – I never got past stage three.

And this whole time, I never really believed in Heaven. Sure, I knew it was there. But all those things the churches said about it, I thought that was load of delusional crap. Because if He would curse a child with the vision to see angels and demons and then damn him to Hell when he couldn’t take the pain, then His kingdom couldn’t be all that fucking fantastic.

I always figured Heaven for a permanent drugged out state – the best high you ever had just going on forever. The immortal morphine drip. But I knew what the other was and damned if I was ending up there. Anything’s better than that.

There are warmongers on both sides of the divide – Gabriel, Balthazar – those who just want to bring the stand-off to an end no matter how bloody. So the raising of Mammon, that was the cosmic equivalent of the Cuban missile crisis. And in this case, too, we were saved by the fact that both the leaders were dedicated to preserving the peace. Imagine that. Lucifer, a force for peace. To Them it’s not about having the better army, anyway, it’s about who’s ideology will win out. Good or Evil.

The way I figure it, there’s no such thing as Good and Evil. There’s just pain and pleasure. And They don’t get how those things are so often intertwined down here and how those things are so often the same thing.

So here I am, enjoying the peace. Walking around when anyone else with my illness would have died. Given a stay of execution. All those poor slobs, the other mortals, they are bound by these rules, but not me. I managed to cheat them again. It puts a wall between me and everyone else, that knowledge.

Now I got my chance back and I really am just like everyone else. But I can’t stop thinking like an exception. I keep falling back into the habit of ignoring the rules, taking risks as if I have nothing to lose. But that’s not true anymore.

I’m standing on the edge of a precipice. I wake up at night from dreams of falling, afraid that I’ve taken that one tiny step too far without even knowing it. I got my chance to go to Heaven, the only thing I’ve ever wanted, the thing I’ve thought about and fought for for twenty years. Now I have it. And I have no fucking clue what to do with it.  



End file.
